1. Field of the Invention
An embodiment of the present invention relates to a pointing device user interface implementation technology, and more particularly, to a pointing device user interface method, medium, and system robust against external noise that can remove light source noise by distinguishing between light source noise and actual light sources.
2. Description of the Related Art
With the advent of digital TV broadcasting, there has been rapid growth in the field of remote controllers for menu navigation. Accordingly, there has been increased demand for graphic user interfaces (GUIs) for remote controllers. In addition, various types of user interfaces have also been developed and proposed in order to further embody the same with digital content management (DCM). Conventional remote controllers display what is currently being selected by a user and typically permit the selection of a menu or control of particular operations through direction keys, e.g., up, down, left and right direction keys. However, when such direction keys are employed there is limited capability for quickly executing a large variety of operations that may be available, e.g., such as those offered for digital TV. For example, when a digital TV is linked to a network with Internet capabilities, exemplary web browsing cannot be easily controlled with only the direction keys of the remote controller. Accordingly, in order to overcome such remote controller drawbacks, research has been underway for user interface technologies for pointing devices with the capability to determine the position of a cursor on an a display, for example, by directly pointing to a spot on the display.
Such pointing devices control a cursor on the display by extracting/observing a corresponding screen area of the display, e.g., a digital TV, and calculating coordinates of the cursor, or pointed to spot, on the display. Here, it is preferable that the screen area of the display may be directly pointed and an absolute pointed to position be determined by the extracting/observing of the screen area of the display. In order to implement an interface technology using such a pointing device, a pointed to position between a pointing device (e.g., a remote controller, a pointer, and the like) and a display needs to be calculated. However, in the conventional methods, the observing of the screen and determining of the pointed to position has been determined based upon a frequency signal of identifying lights on the display itself, or within a screen area of the display. The frequency signal of the identifying lights may be observed when the pointing device is turned upside down, or the observation may be improperly based on observed noise (lights potentially reflecting off the screen and appearing similar to such identifying lights) and mistakenly identified as such identifying lights. Accordingly, the actual pointed to position may not be properly calculated, resulting in a malfunction of the controlling of the user interface of the display. This potential miscalculation can be more fully seen with the following reference to FIGS. 1A through 2B.
FIG. 1A illustrates the actual arrangement order of light sources disposed on the screen of a display, while FIG. 1B illustrates an image of the display as picked up by a camera disposed with the pointing device. Accordingly, FIG. 1B illustrates an incorrect operation observation problem, in a state, where a pointing device has been rotated, according to a conventional technology. As can be seen by FIG. 1B, on the picked up image, light sources LED1, LED2, LED3, and LED4 are mistakenly recognized as light sources LED3, LED1, LED4, and LED2, respectively, resulting in coordinate values calculated from the pointing device being improperly calculated to correspond to a different point rotated by 90 degrees. That is, if a pointed to spot is moved upward, the actual cursor may move to the right on the screen. Likewise, when the pointing device is upside down or rotated along the alternate 90 degrees, the display would similarly operate improperly.
Similarly, FIGS. 2A and 2B illustrate another conventional incorrect operation problem where noise of non-designated light sources exist. Here, FIG. 2A illustrates a display and light sources disposed along outer edges of the display or screen of the display, while FIG. 2B illustrates the actual image picked up by a camera with the pointing device. As can be seen by FIG. 2B, the pointing device may not be able to recognized which observed light is actually noise. Accordingly, the display cannot be operated properly because the coordinates of the position actually pointed by the pointing device is either miscalculated or may not even be determined.